Post WWII political chaos:
a cross-cultural view
In this article on the "Korean My Lai" Cumings points out that chronologically, My Lai -like massacres were happening in the early years of the Korean war right after WWII long before the Vietnam war.
They were also happening in Burma without active participation of any foreign power like the United States. Writing about the early years of the civil war in 1950's U Nu Burma, the journalist U Thaung discusses the public executions by firing squad he covered (p. 14), the murder of the Karen leader Saw Ba U Gyi by Sein Lwin despite his surrender (xi-xii), and the massacre of Karens in downtown Yangon:
"On 1 February 1949, General Smith-Dun, a Karen national, who had led the Burmese army since independence as Commander-in-Chief, was sent on indefinite leave. General Ne Win took over the armed forces. On the next day, 2 February, the Karen National Defence Organization was declared an unlawful association. Ahlone, the area of Rangoon where most Karen nationals lived, was set ablaze. Fire engines were prevented from reaching there. Karen nationals rushing out of their burning houses were shot down. I arrived there as soon as permission was granted...Dead bodies were everywhere in the streets. Many of them were children and young girls."
Of course, one emotional entry in a memoir does not constitute historical proof, but it is worth considering the possibility that political violence and bloody massacres were a common feature of many of the post-WWII political transitions in places as different as South Korea and Burma.
Because of Burma's history of isolation in the post-WWII era it is easy to perpetually find nothing but difference and fall into the "fallacy of difference" which David Hackett Fischer defines as "the tendency to conceptualize a group in terms of its special characteristics to the exclution of its generic characteristics." (Fischer, Historian's Fallacies: TOwards a logic of historical thought, p. 222)
They were also happening in Burma without active participation of any foreign power like the United States. Writing about the early years of the civil war in 1950's U Nu Burma, the journalist U Thaung discusses the public executions by firing squad he covered (p. 14), the murder of the Karen leader Saw Ba U Gyi by Sein Lwin despite his surrender (xi-xii), and the massacre of Karens in downtown Yangon:
"On 1 February 1949, General Smith-Dun, a Karen national, who had led the Burmese army since independence as Commander-in-Chief, was sent on indefinite leave. General Ne Win took over the armed forces. On the next day, 2 February, the Karen National Defence Organization was declared an unlawful association. Ahlone, the area of Rangoon where most Karen nationals lived, was set ablaze. Fire engines were prevented from reaching there. Karen nationals rushing out of their burning houses were shot down. I arrived there as soon as permission was granted...Dead bodies were everywhere in the streets. Many of them were children and young girls."
Of course, one emotional entry in a memoir does not constitute historical proof, but it is worth considering the possibility that political violence and bloody massacres were a common feature of many of the post-WWII political transitions in places as different as South Korea and Burma.
Because of Burma's history of isolation in the post-WWII era it is easy to perpetually find nothing but difference and fall into the "fallacy of difference" which David Hackett Fischer defines as "the tendency to conceptualize a group in terms of its special characteristics to the exclution of its generic characteristics." (Fischer, Historian's Fallacies: TOwards a logic of historical thought, p. 222)
posted by Jon Fernquest at 2:49 AM
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